4

Imagining Liberation

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

· 4.1 Summarize early queer cultural expression in urban areas.

· 4.2 Describe the significance of WWII to the development of queer cultural centers.

· 4.3 Explain the devastating legacy of McCarthyism on sexual rights advocacy.

· 4.4 List the contributions of mid-20th-century homophile rights groups.

· 4.5 Describe the emergence of queer activism in the latter half of the 20th century.

· 4.6 Explain the contours of gay liberation movements in the latter half of the 20th century.

We have seen that some of the early sexologists—Havelock Ellis is a prime example—moved past the crime-or-sin framing of homosexuality. The new casting of queerness as pathology certainly reflected their cultures’ desire to classify and control nonnormative sexuality. This chapter will describe and discuss the medicalization of homosexuality beginning in the last third of the 19th century. This process brought with it negative assumptions about gay men and lesbians and led to traumatic (and ineffective) “treatments” for various presumed disorders related to sexuality. At the same time we hear the first voices calling for understanding and acceptance of sexual minority individuals. Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, describing Urnings and Urninds [λ Chapter 2], and John Addington Symonds, writing to the poet Walt Whitman hoping in vain for validation [λ Chapter 9], represent the earliest beginnings of queer activism. This period also saw the increasing rise of the women’s rights movement. Not surprisingly, part of the backlash against turn-of-the-century feminism took the form of lesbian baiting.

Indeed, the turn of the 20th century in the United States and in Europe was marked by a continuation of the process of women gaining increasing access to education and autonomy from the interdependency of family life and its many obligations. In the last half of the 19th century, many women’s colleges were established in the United States—Mills in 1865, Smith and Wellesley in 1875, Spelman (the first Black women’s college) in 1881, and Bryn Mawr in 1888. For many women, choosing college was tantamount to refusing heterosexual marriage. Between 1889 and 1908, 53% of women educated at Bryn Mawr were unmarried, and more generally, between 1877 and 1924, 75% of women earning doctorates did not marry (McGarry 52). The eugenicists of their day were alarmed at this development. As early as 1838 (that is, pre-Darwin), Henry F. Harrington had warned that educated women were no more than “mental hermaphrodites” (293). A generation later, Dr. Edward Clarke castigated educated middle-class young women in the United States for developing their brains at the expense of their reproductive capacities. By 1900, Dr. William Lee Howard could refer to independent women as “disgusting anti-social being[s] … —degenerates” (687). The reaction set in even as progress was taking place. Educated, independent, unmarried women were figured as representing evolutionary decay, and the benign Boston marriage could then be seen as a “degenerate” lesbian sexual relationship. In addition, these men and others linked feminist activism to lesbianism; thus, the woman suffrage movement and later activist organizations had to struggle against accusations that their members were deviants likely to corrupt others.

As we saw in Chapter 2, however, some turn-of-the-century psychologists offered more moderate opinions regarding lesbianism in particular and homosexuality in general. Freud, Ellis, and Hirschfeld stood in opposition to Howard in seeing homosexuality as neither a sin nor a sign of degeneracy but simply a natural variation of the human species. Others have argued that in part because it is a variation and not the norm—and also because of the long history of persecution and punishment of those engaging in same-sex (and other non-sanctioned) sexual acts—homosexuality should continue to be restricted or outlawed by the state. Such thinking persists in the contemporary world. For example, in his dissenting opinion to the Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling (2003) [λ Chapter 5] that laws prohibiting sodomy are a violation of “personal dignity and autonomy,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted that in the United States, sodomy laws date back to the Colonial era, and there are “records of 20 sodomy prosecutions and 4 executions during the colonial period” (Scalia). Scalia, in short, was arguing that society needs laws against sodomy because society has always had laws against sodomy—in other words, that a law’s prior existence is sufficient reason for it to continue to exist, whether or not the norms of society have evolved in a different direction. Many countries in the world either presently have or have had laws that prohibit homosexual behavior, mostly based on religious beliefs that homosexuality is both abnormal and immoral. In the Western world, these laws have been under continuous scrutiny and discussion, but there are still places in the world—India and Singapore, for instance—where homosexual acts can bring the offender a sentence of life in prison. In Afghanistan and Iran, homosexuality is punishable by execution. However, many countries in the world have either overturned their sodomy statutes or never imposed them at all.

URBAN LIFE AND SEXUAL EXPRESSION

Despite the sometimes uneasy relationship we described in the previous chapter between LGBTQ people and the medical establishment throughout much of the 20th century, that time also saw the rise of many prominent and visible queer communities. In the United States, the era known as the Harlem Renaissance, which lasted from the Roaring Twenties through the Depression in the 1930s, helped provide meeting places and creative and sexual outlets for many African American artists and writers [λ Chapters 9 and 10]. Known primarily as an era during which African American art, literature, music, dance, and social commentary flourished in the Harlem section of New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was also marked by the attitude that homosexuality was a personal matter. As a result, artists, actors, musicians, and literati who earned respect for their artistic and scholarly work could be fairly open about their sexuality. Lesbian and gay performers and artists such as Ma Rainey, Mabel Hampton, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay were significant figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Though it is important to understand that the “closet door” was somewhat open for these individuals, their ability to be “out” should not be read in contemporary terms. There was, for these gay men and lesbians, a significant threat should their sexuality become too much of a focus. Discrimination in housing and employment, as well as the threat of institutionalization or imprisonment, were dangers—and for African American homosexuals, the intertwining of racial discrimination and homophobia intensified these threats. Communities where expressions of nonnormative sexuality were somewhat accepted were also emerging in Europe. In Berlin in 1904, for example, Anna Rüling urged the fledgling women’s movement to attend to “Uranian” concerns. In Parisian salons, artists and intellectuals gathered in relative safety to find both intellectual and emotional community, and sexual openness was welcomed. Famous lesbians and bisexuals such as Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, and Colette developed a community in which nonjudgmental attitudes and emotional and creative support were offered freely The Bloomsbury group in London, which included bisexual and homosexual individuals such as Dora Carrington, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, was known for its plain sex talk, and many of its members openly supported Radclyffe Hall when The Well of Loneliness was taken to court on obscenity charges [λ Chapter 9]. While it is true that many LGBTQ people today see The Well of Loneliness as afflicted by self-loathing and internalized homophobia, it was the first novel to present a portrayal of lesbian (some say trans) life, and backing it clearly indicated support of a sexual lifestyle alternative to heterosexuality.

As we can see, popular attitudes about sexuality evolve inconsistently based on the realities of particular moments in time. Contemporary Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or even queer might be tempted to look back at the history of their predecessors’ treatment and see the past as “the bad old days” and the present as marked by greater openness and liberation. Such a view of history, though, does not take into account the tendency of attitudes toward sexuality to loosen and then tighten again. There have been many historical moments when fairly accepting societies became more restrictive as a result of a particular social crisis. In the United States, the social openness of the 1920s and early 1930s was interrupted by the Depression. Many believed that the Depression was a kind of “retribution” for a generation of American decadence, and one response to a growing scarcity of resources and access to the necessities for living was an increasing conservatism in social attitudes. In Germany, the Nazis’ rise to power—also related indirectly to the worldwide Depression—led not only to more conservative attitudes toward homosexuals but also to outright persecution.

WORLD WAR II AND HOMOSEXUALITY

Due in part to the work of scholars such as Erwin Haeberle, we can see that before World War II, Germany led the world in research and activist reform work around the acceptance of homosexuality as a reasonable sexual alternative to heterosexuality. Much of the early sexological research was done by German Jews—Magnus Hirschfeld, for example. During the turbulence of the 1930s, however, much of the sexologists’ work was lost when the Nazis destroyed all German sexological research and began their persecution of Jews, homosexuals, and others. Figure 4.1 shows the different badges used to identify groups who were persecuted by the Nazis.

Figure 4.1 This is a chart of the different badges prisoners of Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear.

Source: From Sachsenhausen Memorial Site, by Gen Baugher.

When Germany became a unified nation in 1871, its new legal code included Paragraph 175, which outlawed sodomy. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis used this law to arrest approximately 100,000 men they had identified as homosexual (Epstein and Friedman). Before the Nazis came to power, there had been concerted efforts made in Germany to reform the law against sodomy, but the Nazis actually extended the law. One result of this extension was that at the end of World War II, when the remaining prisoners in concentration camps were set free, only the homosexuals were still classified as criminals. Interestingly, Paragraph 175 criminalized sexual activity among men but not among women. It is noteworthy that the pink triangle used to identify homosexual men so that they could be singled out for persecution in the Nazi concentration camps has now become an international symbol for gay liberation.

Before World War II, there was no formal policy against homosexuals serving in the U.S. military. During the war, American women were called upon to serve in the military and to work outside their homes in ways they never had before; furthermore, since World War I, the armed services had had the reputation of being an “ideal breeding ground” for lesbianism. In the 1940s, the military began to use psychiatrists to keep homosexuals from enlisting and to issue what were called blue discharges (because they were often printed on blue paper) to military personnel identified as homosexuals. After the war was over, and when the armed services could afford to remove their homosexual recruits, a Newsweek article from June 9, 1947, reported that the United States military now considered the blue discharges “vague and protective” and would no longer use them; from this point on, even homosexuals who had not been “guilty of a definite offense would receive an ‘undesirable’ discharge” (Miller 241). The article also stated that case histories in U.S. Army files revealed, among other things, that homosexual soldiers “topped the average soldier in intelligence, education, and rating,” with 10% holding college degrees and only “a handful” being illiterate, and on the “whole [homosexual] army personnel were law-abiding and hard-working” (240). Despite these realities, official policy of the U.S. military was to ferret out homosexuals attempting to enlist by identifying and refusing those men whose looks or behavior seemed effeminate or by testing potential enlistees for knowledge of homosexual customs or vocabulary. Their rationale was that the morale of heterosexual servicemen would be compromised if they were required to live and work with homosexuals, whose supposed uncontrollable and inappropriate sexual desire made them inherently untrustworthy. As Kathleen Parker writes, the prohibition of gay servicemen was based solely on “military objectives: unit cohesion, military discipline, order and morale. It [was] not about the rights of gays to serve, but about the rights of non-gays to be protected from forced intimacy with people who may be sexually attracted to them” (B7).

Several lesbians who served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) reported that their direct supervisors were unwilling to push the sexuality issue because their services were so desperately needed. Among these was Johnnie Phelps, whose story is recounted by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Randy Shilts, and several film documentaries. According to Phelps, she was summoned by the general-in-command of her battalion (Dwight D. Eisenhower), who told her that he wanted to rid the battalion of lesbians and commanded that she draw up a list of women who fit that description. Phelps claims she told Eisenhower that she would be willing to draw up such a list as long as he understood that her name would be at its top and that the list would include at least “95%” of the women in the battalion; Eisenhower quickly rescinded the order.

We should remember that World War II was not the first moment when gay men and lesbians visibly served the war effort. World War I was an important turning point for women who wanted to serve in the military. Britain, the United States, Russia, and Germany all allowed women to officially enlist in the military for the first time. Though Britain, the United States, and Germany did not allow women to serve in combat, the Russian military included about 2,000 women soldiers who fought in what was called the “Women’s Battalion of Death,” formed and commanded by Maria Bochkareva. There are, of course, no data on the number of lesbians serving in the Battalion of Death, and Bochkareva herself was twice married to men. Among women identifying as lesbian who served in some capacity during World War I were Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Radclyffe Hall, all of whom served as ambulance drivers. Stein and Toklas had a Ford shipped to Paris from the United States and outfitted it as an ambulance. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and her short story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” tell of lesbians serving in the British military during World War I; both works describe women experiencing for the first time (1) the self-validation involved in serving one’s country as a uniformed citizen, and (2) the exhilaration of being recognized as a lesbian in a world of women.

MCCARTHY AND THE PURGE OF THE “PERVERTS”

The now-infamous Joseph McCarthy was, during the early part of his career, a fairly unknown member of the U.S. Senate. In 1950, he and other political leaders led an attempt to ferret out and purge the country of Communists; they also charged that homosexuals were a threat to national security, publicly referring to them as “perverts” and claiming that they had infiltrated the government and were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists” (McGarry 37). The fear that homosexuals were both emotionally unstable and particularly susceptible to extortion lay at the core of the argument made by McCarthy and his aide, Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man and the actual architect of the campaign to purge the government of homosexuals. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450. This order made “sexual perversion” sufficient reason for exclusion from federal employment; as a result, homosexuals were fired from federal jobs eight times more frequently than before 1950 (McGarry 37).

From the very beginning, the notion that the government was overrun with Communist sympathizers was closely linked to the idea that the Communist threat was related to homosexuality. At about the same time that McCarthy announced to an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had in his hand a list of 205 members of the Communist Party who were working in the State Department (he later admitted that what he actually waved before that audience was a laundry list), Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy testified before a Senate committee that there were 91 “persons in the shady category” working in the government. He added that “[m]ost of these were homosexuals.” Guy George Gabrielson, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1949 to 1952, warned that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts [homosexuals] who have infiltrated the Government in recent years.” The connection of Communism to homosexuality became embedded in the popular imagination when a New York Daily News political commentator reported that an “all-powerful, super-secret inner circle of highly educated, socially highly placed sexual misfits” had “infiltrated” the State Department and warned that these people were “all easy to blackmail, all susceptible to blandishments by homosexuals in foreign nations” (Miller 258–9). Some 1950s-era homoerotic posters portraying Russian and Chinese military allies only deepened Western paranoia.

Find Out More View a gallery of homoerotic propaganda posters featuring the Russian Chinese alliance from the 1950s at http://bit.ly/2bRPgCL, procured by Horace Lu.

Ironically, the period of the McCarthy witch hunts was also the time when much of the work took place that finally led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness. Before that time, most American studies of homosexuality had focused on mental patients or prisoners. In the 1950s, Evelyn Hooker did the first extensive study of homosexuals not incarcerated in mental hospitals or prisons. Hooker found that there were few if any clear psychological differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals besides those related to the burdens of oppression and the necessity for hiding one’s sexual preferences from family, friends, and coworkers. She also found the psychological diversity of homosexuals to be similar to that of heterosexuals. Many in the psychological community responded to this work with surprise and sometimes skepticism. Other scholars also began to question long-held assumptions about sexuality.

Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), coauthored with Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, elicited great interest from the average American. In these books, Kinsey characterized homosexuality as a normally occurring sexual alternative. Because Kinsey was so well known, Americans often see him as the “father of sexology” [λ Chapter 3]. Kinsey proposed that all people exist on a heterosexual–homosexual continuum and that approximately 10% of the population is homosexual. Picking up on this work, Donald Webster Cory (a pseudonym for Edward Sagarin) wrote The Homosexual in America in 1951. This widely read book was among the first to describe homosexual life, focusing on both emerging gay culture and discrimination.

Kinsey and Cory were liberalizing voices in the repressive postwar years. Such thinking occurred in a cultural context of growing critique, particularly in the United States. Some artists, writers, and social nonconformists were gathering around the term beat to describe both a sense of being “beaten down” by conservative views and forces and a desire to “march to the beat of a different drummer,” to paraphrase Thoreau. The Beats gained much notoriety in the 1950s, and they were often very sympathetic to the plight of homosexuals. Some among them, such as poet Allen Ginsberg, became outspoken homosexual artists [λ Chapter 9].

Still, the McCarthyite prejudices lingered. Even as countercultural movements arose in the 1960s, some social critics who seemed very different from figures such as McCarthy and Cohn felt free to speak out against homosexuals. Feminist leader Betty Friedan, for instance, lamented that “homosexuality … is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene.” Friedan picked up on the “gay is sick” theme by saying that homosexuality was created by the “parasitical motherlove” of women confined to the home by social pressures designed to keep women out of the workforce (Wolfe). Friedan also coined the phrase “The Lavender Menace” to describe lesbians in the feminist movement; this phrase eventually became a rallying call for lesbians who left mainstream organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) to form more welcoming communities around political activism on behalf of lesbians.

THE HOMOPHILE MOVEMENT

At the close of World War II, some lesbians and gay men began to understand themselves as a social minority oppressed and made invisible by a larger, unfeeling, and wrongheaded heterosexual majority. This new way of seeing homosexuality helped create an environment in which the notion that homosexuality was a sickness or a perversion could be effectively challenged not only by physicians and psychotherapists but also by homosexuals themselves. In a 1948 issue of her self-published newsletter Vice Versa, “Lisa Ben” (an anagram for lesbian), proclaimed, “I for one consider myself neither an error of nature nor some sort of psychological freak. Friends of similar tendencies … also refuse to regard themselves in this light. Is it not possible that we are just as natural and normal by our standards as so-called ‘normals’ are by theirs?” (10).

In the United States, this kind of resistant thinking gave rise to what is known as the homophile movement. The primary goal of homophile organizations was to gain acceptance for gay men and lesbians by heterosexuals. In the early 1950s, Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). These and other organizations made some advances in gaining acceptance and rights for lesbians and gay men, and they were successful in increasing visibility. The mainstream media, by contrast, continued to present gay life as seedy, sordid, and dangerous. Consider, for instance, the Time article mentioned earlier, which presents homosexuals as part of a dark “underground” and features a debate among “experts” about whether homosexuality is an illness. Although it did bring news of the existence of other homosexuals to many nonurban heterosexuals and homosexuals, it also supported the notion that homosexuals were sad, sick, and sexually predatory.

At this time, police frequently harassed gay men and lesbians—especially those they saw as resisting traditional gender roles—in gay bars and on the streets. Landlords could evict gay men and lesbians without cause. In response, the Veterans’ Benevolent Association, founded in New York City in 1945, focused its efforts on helping homosexuals who were arrested or who were discriminated against in employment or housing because of their homosexuality. The Knights of the Clock, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, served as a social group for interracial gay couples who were not comfortable with the bar scene (McGarry 142). The Mattachine Society, founded by Harry Hay in 1950, was perhaps the best known homophile organization in the country. Hay, a longtime member of the Communist Party, founded the group in response to the anti-Communist and anti-homosexual environment created by McCarthy and his cronies. The group had a complex administrative setup that was developed to maintain the anonymity of its founders and give it the impenetrable structure Hay thought would protect it against outside assault. The organization adopted the name “Mattachine” in reference to a group of medieval French townsmen who “conducted dances and rituals in the countryside during the Feast of Fools at the vernal equinox” (Miller 334). Generally, the Mattachine Society and the DOB worked toward assimilation of gays and lesbians and argued their similarity to the heterosexual mainstream. In keeping with this philosophy, homophile organizations often asked men participating in gay rights marches to wear business suits complete with ties and women to wear skirts that fell to the knee or below. Some members of the homophile movement did not fully embrace the assimilationist goals of Mattachine and DOB. For instance, one subgroup of Mattachine began publishing One, a magazine that eventually had a national circulation of 5,000. One was less assimilationist in its tone than the official rhetoric of the Mattachine Society. Similarly, the DOB was not a monolithic organization; as the middle-class lesbians in the group began to become more and more political, many working-class lesbians broke away from the DOB to form localized social groups.

The early and mid-20th century saw dramatic challenges that directly affected both popular and political perceptions of LGBTQ people and the evolving self-perception of gays and lesbians, many of whom were searching for a way to articulate their emerging sense of identity in an often hostile sociocultural and political climate. Americans tend to understand the late 1960s and early 1970s as a time when attitudes about alternative sexualities changed dramatically, fueled in part by the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973. We see similar changes in other countries. In the United Kingdom, although the 1957 Wolfenden Act decriminalized homosexuality, it was classified as a disease there until 1994. In 1992, the World Health Organization stopped classifying homosexuality as a disease. In 2001, the Chinese government did the same (“China”). In short, the efforts of activists working for sexual freedom in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s led to important changes in medical opinion and criminal statutes, many of which have paved the way for later activists to challenge long-held negative opinions about lesbians and gay men. Such activism has profoundly influenced more recent history.

EMERGING VISIBILITY AND ACTIVISM

In 1966, a crowd of angry gay and trans people fought back against police harassment at the Compton Cafeteria in California. In their 2005 documentary Screaming Queens, Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman argue that this riot represented “the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States” (“Screaming”). Many LGBTQ also people identify the beginning of a highly visible gay rights movement in the United States with the Stonewall riots, which occurred on June 27 and 28, 1969, in New York City. The riots erupted in response to police harassment of patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar. Having experienced decades of consistent raids on gay bars by police, customers who had been in the Stonewall Inn when the police shut it down that night gathered outside the building, cheering whenever another person was released by the police and emerged. Most of the bar patrons were eventually released, but the bar staff, three drag queens, and two male-to-female trans people were held and eventually escorted outside to be loaded into a paddy wagon. The crowd’s jovial irreverence quickly gave way to anger and protest as others swarmed around the Stonewall Inn, throwing bricks and trash cans and initiating several days of riots in the area (Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey). The Stonewall riots immediately took on a significance disproportionate to the actual events, and within a month, the Gay Liberation Front had formed and begun organizing for gay rights and liberation, calling specifically for job protection for gay employees, an end to police harassment, and the decriminalization of sodomy.

As we have seen, organizing for lesbian and gay visibility and rights was not new; the Mattachine Society and the DOB, among others, made important attempts during the 1950s to organize gays and lesbians politically and to educate American society about discrimination against queer people. Mattachine and DOB frequently argued that gays and lesbians were “normal” Americans, and these groups encouraged members to dress and behave in ways that conformed to middle-class gender norms. In contrast, the Stonewall riots represented a more spontaneous form of direct action and civil unrest, carried out primarily by working-class people. Hence, the Stonewall rioters in some ways resembled many youth, antiwar, and civil rights movements engaging in political activism at that time. Furthermore, coming at the end of the 1960s, the Stonewall riots occurred at a time when many American citizens were questioning sexual mores and traditional values. The time seemed ripe for gays, lesbians, and gender nonconformists to articulate their political desires in more direct and even confrontational ways. A number of these countercultural movements began in grassroots working-class rebellion and subsequently morphed into rights organizations with middle-class leadership and gradually less radical goals. In many ways, the Stonewall riots have served as an important symbol of the fight for greater queer visibility and political power. LGBTQ social and political organizations around the world use Stonewall in their names, and annual pride parades in June across the globe celebrate the uprisings (Manalansan). But what kind of political action did the riots suggest was emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) took its activist energy from other left-leaning movements, specifically socialist organizations and those protesting the Vietnam War. The name of the organization derived from North Vietnam’s National Liberation Front and thus served to mark the group as confrontationally countercultural. Among their positions, the GLF sought to raise consciousness about the capitalist systems that they felt oppressed gays, lesbians, and others. In their view, the “GAY LIBERATION FRONT is a revolutionary group of homosexual women and men formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished” (McGarry 163). In publications such as COME OUT! and Carl Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” the GLF strongly encouraged gays and lesbians to assert their visibility and claim political power. More specifically, they felt that social institutions such as the heteronormative nuclear family and persistent sexism were responsible for the oppression of gays and lesbians and that these institutions should be actively challenged and overthrown. Making common cause with Blacks, workers, and the Vietnamese, among others, the GLF figured itself as fighting American imperialism in addition to the homophobia that seemed so much a part of it (D’Emilio). In 1970, meetings of a London-based GLF, soon followed by similar meetings in France, signaled the spread of gay activism in Europe. Front Homosexual d’Action Revolutionnaire, following on the heels of widespread student riots across France in 1968, fought for both homosexual rights and access to free abortion and contraception (Miller).

The rise of lesbian feminism suggested that some activists and thinkers at this time agreed in part with the GLF’s aims but wanted to critique social structures and institutions from more specific and challenging perspectives. The women’s movement had already introduced feminism and feminist concerns to the popular consciousness, and lesbian feminism highlighted the connection between feminist theory and lesbian practice. A rallying call of lesbian feminism, commonly attributed to Ti-Grace Atkinson, was “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice.” In 1969, activist and author Rita Mae Brown and two of her colleagues resigned from the National Organization of Women because Betty Friedan, one of NOW’s founders, warned of a “lavender menace” of lesbians who might co-opt the organization for their own ends and, worse, undermine potential public sympathy. Emerging lesbian feminist collectives, such as The Furies and Radicalesbians, argued specifically for a separate “Lesbian Nation” (Johnston). In a manifesto titled “The Woman-Identified Woman,” Radicalesbians praised the “primacy of women relating to women” as a way of achieving unity. In 1973, the message was “Lesbian, lesbian, any woman can be a lesbian” (from the album Lavender Jane Loves Women, Alix Dobkin). After all, they reasoned, if the term woman-identified woman was substituted for the troublesome term lesbian, more women could be gathered under their radical umbrella.

Find Out More in “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the end of this chapter.

Lesbian feminists believed that the antiwar movement was sexist and the women’s movement homophobic, so they advocated for social and political separatism. Believing that all men, including gay men, were sexist, they argued that “working with men only takes away valuable time that should be spent working with lesbians” (McGarry 179). In significant ways, a vibrant and varied women’s culture emerged out of such activist work; women-only music festivals, such as the National Women’s Music Festival and the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival [λ Chapter 13], as well as women-centered publishers such as Daughters, Naiad, Crossing, Kitchen Table, and Aunt Lute, promoted lesbian feminist thinking and activism. Clearly, lesbian feminism highlighted many lesbians’ feelings that an enormous political and social divide existed between their worlds and goals for liberation movements and those of their male counterparts. Not all lesbians were separatists, however, and not all gay men were misogynists. The Combahee River Collective specifically rejected separatism for Black lesbians.

Figure 4.2 Original album cover, Alix Dobkin’s Lavender Jane Loves Women.

Original album cover, Alix Dobkin’s Lavender Jane Loves Women.

Find Out More in “The Combahee River Collective Statement” at the end of this chapter.

THE POLITICS OF LIBERATION

Liberation politics gave progressive lesbians and gay men a sense of belonging to a community that was both political and social, and activism had a positive impact on the day-in-and-day-out treatment of bar owners and their patrons. The gay bar—including the newly popular discotheque—became a safer meeting place than it had been during the 1950s and 1960s. Nonetheless, a sense at the time was that there was a clear and strongly policed divide between “the bar” and the more political LGBTQ work being done outside the bar. It was not uncommon for LGBTQ activists to critique those they believed “wasted time” on the bar scene as being unconcerned about larger political issues; as well, it was not uncommon for disco queens and bar dykes to see the earnest activists as outsiders and downers. The reality is, though, that the bars and the political organizations served different, though equally important, purposes: the bar tended to be a source of information about local clinics, a place for gay candidates to distribute campaign brochures, and a venue in which people could share advertisements and addresses for gay-friendly businesses. Outside the bar, activists began to organize campaigns to gain visibility for LGBTQ people and to help further national and international political goals.

On November 27, 1978, former City Supervisor Dan White sneaked into San Francisco City Hall through a basement window, avoiding metal detectors. He entered the office of Mayor George Moscone and shot him dead. White then walked down the hall to Supervisor Harvey Milk’s office and killed him too. That night a huge crowd gathered outside City Hall to mourn Milk, the first openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The candlelight vigil was seen on newscasts around the country and not only elicited sympathy from millions of Americans but also produced a strong outcry against antigay rhetoric and violence.

Milk had been elected to the Board of Supervisors 11 months earlier. He and White had served together on the board, though their relationship was strained. As a supervisor, White had vowed to rid the city of “radicals, social deviates, and incorrigibles” and represented the only actively antigay voice on the board (Sinclair 221). White resigned from the board after serving less than a year because he could not support his family on the low salary.

After the murders, White’s lawyers blamed his actions on “diminished capacity” due to depression and convinced a nearly all-white, largely working-class and conservative jury to find the defendant guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not first-degree murder, with a sentence of seven years in prison (Miller 407). After the verdict, the public mood shifted from grief to fury. Angry and disillusioned gays and lesbians took to the streets, burning police cars and vandalizing property in what became known as the White Night Riots. In response, the San Francisco police virtually invaded the Castro gay district.

Figure 4.3 Harvey Milk and George Moscone.

Bettmann/Getty Images

In 1977, the same year Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Dade County, Florida, passed a Human Rights Ordinance, including lesbians and gays among those protected from discrimination. In response, former Miss America and Florida orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant led a “Save Our Children” campaign seeking to repeal the ordinance.

Figure 4.4 Anita Bryant after an activist threw a pie in her face.

Bettmann/Getty Images

Bryant’s group marched under the catchphrase, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit,” to which Milk responded, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.” Forging alliances with fundamentalist Christian ministers and mobilizing antigay voters throughout Florida, the Save Our Children campaign won a resounding victory in June 1977, overturning the Human Rights Ordinance with nearly 70% of the vote (Miller 403). Save Our Children was a response to the growing gay and lesbian liberation movement, which saw visibility as an avenue to increased political power. Bryant’s organization folded in 1979, but during its brief existence, it came to represent the new tactics of a resurgent religious right.

Milk’s election and the furor after his assassination on one hand and Bryant’s antigay campaign on the other characterize the tumultuous history of increasing LGBTQ visibility in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. As LGBTQ people moved into mainstream institutions and claimed both greater visibility and political power, reactionaries and social conservatives redoubled efforts to promote so-called traditional values. Reactions among LGBTQ people and progressive allies have been varied, with numerous positions and stances, sometimes conflicting, evolving as the debate over gay rights has taken shape.

In October 1979, 75,000 to 100,000 people converged on Washington, DC, to hold the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Featured speakers included “Allen Ginsberg and Audre Lorde, feminist activist and writer Kate Millett, DC Mayor Marion Barry, San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, ousted gay U.S. Army Sgt. Leonard Matlovich, and U.S. Rep. Ted Weiss, the chief sponsor of a House gay rights bill” (Chibbaro). After much contentious debate, organizers decided to invite radical Black writer and activist Angela Davis as a speaker, a move that indicated that issues of race and social class were on the minds of at least some of the leaders at the time. Davis declined to speak at the march because the Communist Party, of which she was a member, did not want to lend tacit support to homosexual rights. The 1979 march had been a pet project of the late Harvey Milk, part of his vision of a truly national LGBTQ movement.

Thus, by the end of the 1970s, a culture organized around (groups of) same-sex-loving people seemed more than a dream. The lesbian separatists and other radical feminists were establishing places and politics that celebrated their priorities and desires. Gay men in urban areas constructed a world of disco dancing, drugs, and sex that reflected a joyful hedonistic culture. Civil rights activism was underway, but just for that shining moment it seemed as if U.S. society, at least, might be willing to accommodate an in-your-face subculture whose primary premise was sexual freedom. The assimilationists of the 1950s and 1960s had evidently been eclipsed by the new liberationists.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. The Harlem Renaissance offers us a rich glimpse into a talented, creative, and often politically astute group of writers, musicians, and artists who examined how race works in American society. Several artists and writers who participated in the Harlem Renaissance were also gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Research one artist—a writer, singer, or graphic artist—and find out more about how this person examined both racial and sexual issues in their work.

2. View the film Paragraph 175. Immediately after you have finished the film, summarize its main factual points in a freely written paragraph or in a list. Mark those facts that you have heard before with a star; then mark the facts that are new to you with an asterisk. Before viewing the film, did you know that homosexuals were persecuted by the Nazis? How does knowing that affect you? What do you feel that you still need to know about this issue? What does it mean to you that the pink triangle, which we now identify as an international symbol of gay power and community, was first used by the Nazis as a way of marking homosexual men for persecution?

3. The manifestos of the early gay rights and lesbian feminist activists make for provocative and challenging reading even today. If you had to write your own contemporary manifesto about LGBTQ, queer, or trans issues, what would you put in it? What form would it take? To whom would you address it? Try your hand at writing such a manifesto and compare your writing with the manifestos of early gay and lesbian feminist thinkers.

READINGS

“Donald Webster Cory” (Edward Sagarin) and John P. LeRoy

(1963), United States

“Should Homosexuality Be Eliminated?”

The large majority of the population, in America and abroad, being themselves heterosexual and being antagonistic for various reasons to homosexuals and to their activities, would like to see this aspect of human life eliminated. They may learn, in time, to tolerate it, but it is tolerance in the literal meaning of the word; that is, something that one is able to stand, but of which one does not approve. But, by and large, their aim is the elimination of all sex activities between members of the same sex.

Unfortunately, although the ends sought by such people may, if placed within a realistic contemporary context, seem commendable, the motivations that lead them to these ends are frequently less so. For they condemn homosexual activity, not because the people involved in it are disturbed or unhappy—in fact, just the opposite, because the activities of the hostile community make them more disturbed, more unhappy. They condemn it because it is immoral, or decadent, or ungodly, or for some other equally subjective and entirely unverifiable reason.

Actually, a great deal of the discussion that has been taking place on the question of homosexuality has been centered around the viewpoint that it is a problem, a sign of cultural decadence on a societal level and of immaturity on a personal level; that it is a disease, a maladjustment, or a disturbance. Though some of these descriptive words may be fitting, and others less so, it is entirely possible that it may well be as much of a disturbance in this culture not to accept sexuality—homo-, hetero-, or any other that is voluntarily engaged in among adults.

Upon close observation of the relationship between society and the homosexual, one finds that many people have focused on the neurotic character of individual inverts, while minimizing the social oppression which they must silently bear, while others have ignored the former and emphasized only the latter. Neither should be neglected….

By means of a variety of legal, social, and moral pressures, society makes clear its strong disapproval of homosexuality. But disapproval and punishment do not imply effective diminution. What, if anything, is being done to deter the desire for this activity; to prevent it; to cure it; or to eliminate it? Very little, and for complex reasons that psychologists are beginning to grapple with. The hostile measures of an antagonistic society may even serve to foster the homosexual way of life.

Homosexuality is not deliberately and perversely chosen. A man (or woman) discovers that his psychosexual development has progressed in a different direction from that which is regarded as normal and, for better or worse, must adjust his erotic life accordingly, if he is to have any erotic life at all. All the legal and social sanctions are usually discovered after the person has realized that he is homosexual and, of course, by then it is too late.

The hostility that society directs toward the invert drives him underground, where he must conceal his erotic preferences, rather than bring those desires out into the open, where they can be dealt with objectively. For some, the existence of a twilight world attracts the adventurous rebel for whom living in immediate proximity to danger serves as a source of excitement in an otherwise drab existence. Aside from forcing many homosexuals into a sub-society, which they frequently abhor and in which they function only with anxiety, the hostility also serves to help some homosexuals hate themselves so thoroughly that they unconsciously get themselves into trouble in order to be punished, thereby convincing themselves that the self-hatred was justified. Those inverts whose self-hatred is bound up with a more general type of paranoia would have to find other ways of getting rejected if society were not so antagonistic, but since the hostility is ready-made, the conditions are there on which the pathology can thrive.

The rejection that homosexuals must endure forces them to pretend to be something they are not. Under such conditions, they have difficulty functioning well, either as humans or as homosexuals. Their self-image is undermined, they must lead a double life. None of these difficulties help to eliminate homosexuality, nor do they keep it from spreading, nor do they deter it, nor do they help people find a cure for it. Hostility serves only to add anxieties to life, not to overcome them. It creates wide chasms between those who would otherwise be close, such as members of the same family. It makes the gathering of accurate information about homosexuality difficult, because homosexuals fear an open avowal of their lives and hence few are available as subjects for research. Worst of all, it makes people hate themselves who do nobody any harm and who might otherwise have led happier, healthier, and more useful lives.

The reasons for the officially expressed hatred of homosexuality are many and varied. In ancient and medieval times, semen was looked upon as a precious substance, for in it was contained the seed for a new human being to be sown in the woman. Sexual activities and activities that were not procreative in aim were seen as deliberate waste of seed, and in societies riddled by war, famine, disease, and tyranny, a high value was placed on procreation and hence on the seminal fluid. The same antagonisms affected masturbation and promiscuity, which aroused the disapproval of the moralists of the time, but (probably because the lawmakers were themselves involved) did not incite the same social condemnation as did male homosexuality.

In relations between two males, one of whom is a receptor and the other the insertor, the receptor was thought to be allowing his body to be used as a substitute for a woman’s, while the insertor was lowering or corrupting another man to the level of a woman, hence bringing shame upon the institution of manhood. Because men usually have stronger muscles than women, Western societies have placed man in a superior position to women, and man would not tolerate having that position undermined. Lesbian relationships were seen as trivial by comparison, for there could be no analogy so far as lowering or demeaning the status of one or both participants….

Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was popular to think of homosexuality as an inborn biological phenomenon, linked with genetic imbalance, endocrinological disorder, or intermediate sexuality. The work of [Edward] Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and [Richard von] Krafft-Ebing [λ Chapter 2] seemed to point up these conclusions.

Twentieth-century psychology and psychoanalysis laid bare certain psychodynamic aspects of the origins of homosexuality, and proliferated elaborate theories, case histories, and emphasis upon the assumption that homosexuality is a learned tendency and, theoretically at least, should be able to be unlearned. Since homosexuality is a form of human behavior, and since all human behavior has as its root cause a combination of heredity and environment, the etiology of homosexuality must be explained in terms of both, which does not imply a return, even in part, to the discarded concept of inborn inversion. Everyone has a biological capacity for sexual expression, an undirected energy that has been termed the libido. Past the age of puberty, this capacity will manifest itself in a heterosexual fashion in the majority of cases if society effectively and intelligently uses its power to promote such relationships. For the undirected sexual drive can, under favorable social conditions, go toward the other sex, if only because men and women are more biologically compatible than persons of the same sex.

In the cases where homosexuality develops, it is seen as a reaction to some form of frustration, the acting out of some defense mechanism, or an attempt to adjust to a difficult situation in which the other sex is viewed with fearfulness or suspicion, or cannot be obtained for gratification at a certain period, or an inability to obtain such gratification is feared.

However, these psychological factors may only be precipitating ones, since it is possible for two different people to respond to the same environment in different ways. Can heredity explain the reaction to a given environment peculiar to any given individual? For the fact is that certain conditions may precipitate homosexuality for some, but very similar (although never identical) circumstances may not for others. For still others, a similar set of circumstances may make for other types of adjustments, living patterns, or anxieties, sexual or otherwise.

Until more is known, we can only say, in terms that are unfortunately vague, that exclusive homosexuality is a result of reacting to certain types of environmental conditions, usually centering around some traumatic childhood episode, or through continual unhealthful relationships with parents or siblings, usually in which a distorted concept of sexuality is involved. Sometimes these relationships appear to have been the causes for homosexuality, but at other times a different form of maladjustment has resulted.

To define homosexuality as a disease because it is considered socially deviant, with all the consequences of this social attitude, is purely tautological. It is saying that if society considers a phenomenon a disease, it is a disease. But to reduce this to the individual level, one should first determine the prevalence of undefined anxiety, a person’s conception of himself, his ability to function realistically and to have positive relationships with other people, in deciding whether or not a given homosexual is to be regarded as neurotic, psychotic, or emotionally disabled. No doubt many of them are, but this is not a good reason to increase their anxieties and disturbances by condemnation.

The problem is made even more confusing by the fact that many of our social conventions and our hectic way of life tend to precipitate neuroses and psychoses to such an extent that, in a recent study conducted in midtown New York, some eighty percent of the population was judged by a competent team of psychiatrists to be suffering from some form of neurosis, and one-quarter of the population was diagnosed as being emotionally or mentally so disabled as to be nonfunctioning.

So a question has been raging: Are homosexuals always, necessarily, and invariably disturbed? And if they are, is such disturbance a symptom of their general personality disorder—or is it inspired by the hostile society and by life in an environment that fosters not only hate but self-hate?

There are many corollaries and side-issues to this question. Are heterosexuals also disturbed? It would seem that they are, but that their sex orientation is not, in and of itself, a symptom or a cause of such anxieties as they harbor. The same cannot be said of the homosexuals. On the other hand, are we still, despite the advances, despite the Mattachine Society and research grants, obtaining a distorted sample, consisting of those who have, because of their compulsive and self-defeating actions, gotten into trouble, or because of their self-rejection sought therapeutic aid?

One knows so little about the homosexuals who do not come for therapy, and objective comparisons with this type of homosexual along with their heterosexual counterparts have been few and far between. It is probable that, within limits, homosexuals vary in their state of mental health. Some function better than the average; others are similar to most people so far as mental health is concerned, but in all likelihood, the average person is disturbed and anxiety-ridden. If significant differences can be shown between the amount of mental illness present in the homosexual and the heterosexual, one would have to conclude that this difference is not due exclusively to social hostility, nor to faulty personality development, but to a combination of both.

To claim that homosexuality is immature is likewise tautological, for it is a refined way of saying that one is biased against homosexuals. The criteria for maturity are always arbitrary, set up differently for each age and for each society. In our society, one cannot be mature unless one marries and raises a family. Not to do so is regarded as being biologically irresponsible. Freudianism and theories of regression, infantile fixation, and arrested development are glibly mentioned in support of this, as well as the opposition to using sex for something other than procreation. It does not occur to many people who argue that homosexuality is immature that one can have sexual preferences different from their own and still conduct one’s life in a positive, dedicated, and enlightened manner and meet all other criteria for maturity.

This is sometimes taken to mean that although homosexuals may be mature in other respects they are sexually immature because their form of sexuality does not lead to further offspring. By this line of reasoning, the spinster virgin, the celibate priest, the devout nun, and the responsible, contraceptive-using married pair who cannot afford, and hence do not want, children, are all to be grouped into one category of immature people, where they will join the homosexual. The standards for maturity often reflect the biases of those who adopt them.

Our society is preoccupied with family life, and anyone who is not so preoccupied is seen as a lesser person. Single men and women are looked upon with disfavor, while the family man and the loyal wife are seen as pure, wholesome, and virtuous. We are not trying to disparage the advantages of being married and raising a happy, healthy family, nor are we trying to minimize the gratifications that can be obtained thereby. Are we, therefore, to inflict punishment on one who does not fulfill this function? If so, then society should impartially punish all the unmarried, all the childless, lest one suspect that some are being singled out for reasons entirely extraneous to their non-family statuses.

Most homosexuals do not get married, and do not raise families. This, in and of itself, in a society already suffering from overpopulation, is not a sufficiently good reason for wanting to eliminate homosexuality, but it is a good reason why most people should be heterosexual. But heterosexuality having been the primary form of sexuality since time immemorial, and likely to remain so, there seems to be little danger of the family’s dying out as an institution. In fact, there would be no problem of continuing the human species, even if half the population were bisexual half the time! Since we now have a problem of too many people in the world, and with the issue of birth control making headlines, it is untenable that homosexuality should be condemned on the grounds that it is non-procreative. A good deal of time, money, and effort is now going toward making heterosexuality less procreative so that future generations will have enough space on this planet.

Thus, the answer to the question “Should homosexuality be eliminated?” can be made only by clarifying the query itself. A wide variety of sexual experiences, all in non-coercive form, is always desirable, if it helps the individual to explore the many ways of making love and relating to other human beings. Unfortunately, by definition, the homosexuals are not enjoying such a variety, but then, neither are the exclusive heterosexuals. The benefits, if any, accruing to society from such variation are of little help to one who is personally distressed. So the real task should be to eliminate the personal and social unhappiness that is a part of homosexuality in contemporary society, rather than try to do away with the phenomenon itself as an alternative kind of behavior.

Furthermore, all effort should be made to prevent and cure compulsive homosexuality and heterosexuality, so that it will be possible for human beings to function better with either sex. That most people, under most conditions, would choose the other sex, would be inevitable, but this would not make pariahs out of those who choose their own, or both.

American society can begin by examining the totality of its attitudes on all sexual matters. Not bound by outmoded traditions, laws, and customs when they are at variance with scientific tenets, and not hampered by moral codes that are irrelevant and tautological, great progress can be made. With more enlightened attitudes, less hostility, and greater objectivity, we can seek to bring up our children so that they know all that they need to know about sex and its variations, with no shame or guilt associated with them.

America must begin to accept homosexuals as people, and give them whatever prestige, social acceptance, and rewards that are due them on their own merits as individuals, instead of viewing them as curious outcasts. If this is done, perhaps the homosexual will be better able to accept himself, thus alleviating great human distress, but perhaps also laying a foundation for diminished neurotic homosexual activity.

We can encourage therapists to work with their homosexual patients, with the goal of making better people out of them, better suited to lead a happier, healthier existence, less burdened with anxiety, and more capable of dealing with life on its own terms in a positive, realistic fashion. If partial or complete change in sexual orientation is involved in this, then so be it. If it is not, then helping the patient to overcome whatever problems are confronting him and to function in a more psychologically healthy way with himself and the people around him are sufficiently important therapeutic goals, far more important than merely making a heterosexual of him without removing the neuroses and anxieties.

Finally, we can use what resources we have to further enlightened research, so that knowledge about the unknown areas will be forthcoming. If the world powers can afford to spend billions of dollars on armaments, which only serve to destroy people when used, can we not afford to make a worthwhile investment to find out more about the things that may help make life happier for all of us? We can further explore the means for increasing the sexual well-being of the nation, rather than add to our too-high rate of mental illness.

To summarize, should homosexuality be eliminated? We believe:

1. Society should seek to eliminate the personal distress and anxieties that arise as a result of social hostility.

2. Society should cease to define homosexuality per se as immoral, lecherous, or anti-social.

3. Society should aim to isolate those patterns in the contemporary world that are encouraging the development of neurotic and compulsive sexuality.

4. Society should simultaneously seek to make life more pleasurable for those who are homosexual and yet encourage all its growing members to follow the less difficult, more normative path of heterosexuality.

It is a program that is not only, in our opinion, free of contradictions, but it is one that in a practical sense is achievable.

When all is said and done, the important thing is not whether a person is homosexual or heterosexual. The important thing is that he is sexual, that society accepts him as such, and that he accepts himself as such.

“Donald Webster Cory” (Edward Sagarin) and John P. LeRoy. The Homosexual and His Society: A View from Within. Citadel, 1963.

Marilyn Barrow

(1963) United States

“Living Propaganda”

Every person has some prejudices directed against some other person or persons. Prejudices can be numerous in an individual or very few—but they exist in all of us. Some are against ethnic groups, economic classes, physical or mental defects, etc. Some have ludicrous causes, very unreasoning, i.e., “The first blue-spotted person I met offended me; therefore, I hate all blue-spotted people.” Silly? Yes, but not very uncommon.

What do prejudices boil down to? Simply a dislike, mistrust or fear of anything alien to individual experience. We are conditioned into prejudice by our parents, or are affected by public opinion; and sometimes, with homosexuality in particular, the prejudice is a reflection of fear of personal involvement. When prejudice is toward a group, it is directed at the stereotype image of the group. Thus every male homosexual is a limp–wristed faggot and every female homosexual is a stomping bull-dike.

The homosexual organizations are working to combat prejudice and concomitant legal injustices. Even allowing for a miraculous legal success in the next few decades, this would hardly lessen the individual prejudice. Indeed, it would undoubtedly increase it somewhat, just as the recent legal strides for Negroes have created much hostility.

If the first blue-spotted person I met hadn’t been so unpleasant I doubt if I would dislike them so much, even though my mother warned me against blue-spotted people, and in school everyone made fun of blue-spotted people.

And so with every one of us, we are living propaganda. Everyone we meet who knows we are gay, and likes and respects us, is a potential weapon for our struggle.

The flamboyant Lesbian, free-wheeling exponent of the artificial gay life, is hardly a good public image. On the other hand, living a lie does little good. There has to be some middle ground between these two extremes, especially for those of us who want to be respectable citizens in our communities. What does it benefit my people if I am moral and upright, if my appearance in this guise is assumed to be heterosexually oriented? This is living a lie.

In my city I know many homosexuals who are respectable members of the community. None of them, however, would allude to being homosexual except with other homosexuals. In that sense, they are respectable liars. I am not, of course, advocating a wholesale announcement—it does not have to be this way.

Everyone knows that Monty is a homosexual in the organization where he works. A new employee is told this within a month of arriving. However, instead of sneers or innuendo, the information is always told with additions. “Monty is a wonderful guy, he’s worked here for 27 years and everyone loves him.” This is really true. He is feminine enough in appearance so that hiding his homosexuality would be difficult. By admitting it and taking some kidding and being a “good guy” and a “wonderful worker” he is unquestionably the most popular employee. He is living propaganda of a very constructive kind.

In the same organization there is Jack, a very masculine fellow, who is quite easily spotted as gay. He takes the opposite tack, is witty and knife-tongued—and loathed. Jack is brilliant, handsome, a good worker, but he is a damaging kind of living propaganda.

In my office there are 15 women and three male supervisors. The work is a form of public relations, and the job requires initiative and literacy. Almost everyone in the office has had some college. An educated group of fairly young women are likely to be pre-disposed to liberal attitudes toward sexual variation. They are “sharp” and hard to fool.

I am the only Lesbian in the room, and there are apparently no others with tendencies in this direction. Everyone in the room (I am sure) knows that I am homosexual. Each reacts differently depending on his individual personality.

To some I am a joke, likable perhaps, but a joke nevertheless. To most, I am the senior member of the group. Most of them come to me with questions about the work. Some of them fear me (I have a bad temper); most of them like me; and for all except one or two I am their first reasonably intimate contact with a homosexual.

There are humorous and even embarrassing moments. But I know that for the most part these people have a more liberal attitude because of this working situation. Since I live a reasonably acceptable life, ergo, perhaps others like me do also. The head of the office automatically invited my roommate to the Christmas party, just as the married women brought husbands and the unmarried their boyfriends. I have privately been asked many questions, ranging from the very serious to the very humorous. The office wag torments me continuously with innuendo, to get a laugh, in which I am more than happy to join, since she is my favorite in the office. Some months ago, when the movie “West Side Story” was showing here, I arrived one morning to have the wag pop her head into my cubicle and serenade me with this paraphrase: “I feel pretty, I feel pretty, I feel pretty and witty and gay. And I pity any girl who isn’t queer today.”

They know, most of them, that I am not ashamed; somehow they feel that therefore I have nothing to be ashamed of.

With personnel changes, possibly 25 people have been part of the group. And most of them have now had one fairly uneventful and reasonably pleasant work experience with that taboo creature, the Lesbian! I am sure some of them will never need this experience, but some of them will. I am also sure that this will have made them less quick to judge, more understanding in their attitude.

There is a healthy atmosphere when you can be part of the scene as you really are, not as some pretender. It’s a good feeling to be honest, and you may help in the good fight. Try it, try living propaganda in your own life!

Marilyn Barrow, “Living Propaganda.” The Ladder, vol. 8, no. 2, 1963, pp. 4–6.

Radicalesbians

(c. late 1960s–early 1970s), United States

“The Woman-identified Woman”

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society—perhaps then, but certainly later—cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society—the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her—in which case she cannot accept herself—and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women—because we are all women.

It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behavior possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanize women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. Homosexuality is a by-product of a particular way of setting up roles (or approved patterns of behavior) on the basis of sex; as such it is an inauthentic (not consonant with “reality”) category. In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.

But lesbianism is also different from male homosexuality, and serves a different function in the society. “Dyke” is a different kind of put-down from “faggot,” although both imply you are not playing your socially assigned sex role … are not therefore a “real woman” or a “real man.” The grudging admiration felt for the tom- boy, and the queasiness felt around a sissy boy point to the same thing: the contempt in which women—or those who play a female role—are held. And the investment in keeping women in that contemptuous role is very great. Lesbian is a word, the label, the condition that holds women in line. When a woman hears this word tossed her way, she knows she is stepping out of line. She knows that she has crossed the terrible boundary of her sex role. She recoils, she protests, she reshapes her actions to gain approval. Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal, who dares to challenge his prerogatives (including that of all women as part of the exchange medium among men), who dares to assert the primacy of her own needs. To have the label applied to people active in women’s liberation is just the most recent instance of a long history; older women will recall that not so long ago, any woman who was successful, independent, not orienting her whole life about a man, would hear this word. For in this sexist society, for a woman to be independent means she can’t be a woman—she must be a dyke. That in itself should tell us where women are at. It says as clearly as can be said: women and person are contradictory terms. For a lesbian is not considered a “real woman.” And yet, in popular thinking, there is really only one essential difference between a lesbian and other women: that of sexual orientation—which is to say, when you strip off all the packaging, you must finally realize that the essence of being a “woman” is to get fucked by men.

“Lesbian” is one of the sexual categories by which men have divided up humanity. While all women are dehumanized as sex objects, as the objects of men they are given certain compensations: identification with his power, his ego, his status, his protection (from other males), feeling like a “real woman,” finding social acceptance by adhering to her role, etc. Should a woman confront herself by confronting another woman, there are fewer rationalizations, fewer buffers by which to avoid the stark horror of her dehumanized condition. Herein we find the overriding fear of many women toward being used as a sexual object by a woman, which not only will bring her no male-connected compensations, but also will reveal the void which is woman’s real situation. This dehumanization is expressed when a straight woman learns that a sister is a lesbian; she begins to relate to her lesbian sister as her potential sex object, laying a surrogate male role on the lesbian. This reveals her heterosexual conditioning to make herself into an object when sex is potentially involved in a relationship, and it denies the lesbian her full humanity. For women, especially those in the movement, to perceive their lesbian sisters through this male grid of role definitions is to accept this male cultural conditioning and to oppress their sisters much as they themselves have been oppressed by men. Are we going to continue the male classification system of defining all females in sexual relation to some other category of people? Affixing the label lesbian not only to a woman who aspires to be a person, but also to any situation of real love, real solidarity, real primacy among women, is a primary form of divisiveness among women: it is the condition which keeps women within the confines of the feminine role, and it is the debunking/scare term that keeps women from forming any primary attachments, groups, or associations among ourselves.

Women in the movement have in most cases gone to great lengths to avoid discussion and confrontation with the issue of lesbianism. It puts people up-tight. They are hostile, evasive, or try to incorporate it into some “broader issue.” They would rather not talk about it. If they have to, they try to dismiss it as a “lavender herring.” But it is no side issue. It is absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women’s liberation movement that this issue be dealt with. As long as the label “dyke” can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family—then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture. Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status. As long as male acceptability is primary—both to individual women and to the movement as a whole—the term lesbian will be used effectively against women. Insofar as women want only more privileges within the system, they do not want to antagonize male power. They instead seek acceptability for women’s liberation, and the most crucial aspect of the acceptability is to deny lesbianism—i.e., to deny any fundamental challenge to the basis of the female. It should also be said that some younger, more radical women have honestly begun to discuss lesbianism, but so far it has been primarily as a sexual “alternative” to men. This, however, is still giving primacy to men, both because the idea of relating more completely to women occurs as a negative reaction to men, and because the lesbian relationship is being characterized simply by sex, which is divisive and sexist. On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives. On a different political/psychological level, it must be understood that what is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns. In the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the core. For irrespective of where our love and sexual energies flow, if we are male-identified in our heads, we cannot realize our autonomy as human beings.

But why is it that women have related to and through men? By virtue of having been brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves. That definition consigns us to sexual and family functions, and excludes us from defining and shaping the terms of our lives. In exchange for our psychic servicing and for performing society’s non-profit-making functions, the man confers on us just one thing: the slave status which makes us legitimate in the eyes of the society in which we live. This is called “femininity” or “being a real woman” in our cultural lingo. We are authentic, legitimate, real to the extent that we are the property of some man whose name we bear. To be a woman who belongs to no man is to be invisible, pathetic, inauthentic, unreal. He confirms his image of us—of what we have to be in order to be acceptable by him—but not our real selves; he confirms our womanhood—as he defines it, in relation to him—but cannot confirm our personhood, our own selves as absolutes. As long as we are dependent on the male culture for this definition, for this approval, we cannot be free.

The consequence of internalizing this role is an enormous reservoir of self-hate. This is not to say that the self-hate is recognized or accepted as such; indeed most women would deny it. It may be experienced as discomfort with her role, as feeling empty, as numbness, as restlessness, as a paralyzing anxiety at the center. Alternatively, it may be expressed in shrill defensiveness of the glory and destiny of her role. But it does exist, often beneath the edge of her consciousness, poisoning her existence, keeping her alienated from herself, her own needs, and rendering her a stranger to other women. They try to escape by identifying with the oppressor, living through him, gaining status and identity from his ego, his power, his accomplishments—and by not identifying with other “empty vessels” like themselves. Women resist relating on all levels to other women who will reflect their own oppression, their own secondary status, their own self-hate. For to confront another woman is finally to confront one’s self—the self we have gone to such lengths to avoid. And in that mirror we know we cannot really respect and love that which we have been made to be.

As the source of self-hate and the lack of real self are rooted in our male-given identity, we must create a new sense of self. As long as we cling to the idea of “being a woman,” we will sense some conflict with that incipient self, that sense of I, that sense of a whole person. It is very difficult to realize and accept that being “feminine” and being a whole person are irreconcilable. Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow, for ours is an organic revolution. For this we must be available and supportive to one another, give our commitment and our love, give the emotional support necessary to sustain this movement. Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors. As long as woman’s liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to- one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, into finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around—into trying to make the “new man” out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the “new woman.” This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that struggling, incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a realness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

Karla Jay and Allen Young. From Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, 1970, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young, © 1972, 1977, and 1992. Reprinted with permission of the editors.

Combahee River Collective

(1974–1980), United States

“The Combahee River Collective Statement”^*

We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974.¹ During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) the genesis of contemporary Black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) Black feminist issues and practice.

The Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism

Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.

A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO).

Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black Nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.

There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.

Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.

A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.

What We Believe

Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g., mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the western hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with black men against racism, while we also struggle with black men about sexism.

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women’s revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. No one before us has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives. An example of this kind of revelation/conceptualization occurred at a meeting as we discussed the ways in which our early intellectual interests had been attacked by our peers, particularly Black males. We discovered that all of us, because we were “smart” had also been considered “ugly,” i.e., “smart-ugly.” “Smart-ugly” crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our “social” lives. The sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.

As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.

Problems in Organizing Black Feminists

During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. We have found that it is very difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists. We have tried to think about the reasons for our difficulties, particularly since the white women’s movement continues to be strong and to grow in many directions. In this section we will discuss some of the general reasons for the organizing problems we face and also talk specifically about the stages in organizing our own collective.

The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have.

The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. As an early group member once said, “We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women.” We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women. In “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion:

We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.²

Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists’ position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s:

We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser … After all, it is only reasonable that the man be the head of the house because he is able to defend and protect the development of his home … Women cannot do the same things as men— they are made by nature to function differently. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. ability, experience or even understanding. The value of men and women can be seen as in the value of gold and silver—they are not equal but both have great value. We must realize that men and women are a complement to each other because there is no house/family without a man and his wife. Both are essential to the development of any life.³

The material conditions of most Black women would hardly lead them to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to represent some stability in their lives. Many Black women have a good understanding of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday constrictions of their lives, cannot risk struggling against them both.

The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. They are, of course, even more threatened than Black women by the possibility that Black feminists might organize around our own needs. They realize that they might not only lose valuable and hardworking allies in their struggles, but that they might also be forced to change their habitually sexist ways of interacting with and oppressing Black women. Accusations that Black feminism divides the black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black women’s movement.

Still, hundreds of women have been active at different times during the three-year existence of our group. And every Black woman who came, came out of a strongly- felt need for some level of possibility that did not previously exist in her life.

When we first started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO first eastern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for organizing, or even a focus. We just wanted to see what we had. After a period of months of not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising. The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other. Although we were not doing political work as a group, individuals continued their involvement in Lesbian politics, sterilization abuse and abortion rights work, Third World Women’s International Women’s Day activities, and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan Little, and Inéz García. During our first summer, when membership had dropped off considerably, those of us remaining devoted serious discussion to the possibility of opening a refuge for battered women in a Black community. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) We also decided around that time to become an independent collective since we had serious disagreements with NBFO’s bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear political focus.

We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with whom we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to encourage us to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs. One of our members did attend and despite the narrowness of the ideology that was promoted at that particular conference, we became more aware of the need for us to understand our own economic situation and to make our own economic analysis.

In the fall, when some members returned, we experienced several months of comparative inactivity and internal disagreements which were first conceptualized as a Lesbian-straight split but which were also the result of class and political differences. During the summer those of us who were still meeting had determined the need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group. At the beginning of 1976, when some of the women who had not wanted to do political work and who also had voiced disagreements stopped attending of their own accord, we again looked for a focus. We decided at that time, with the addition of new members, to become a study group. We had always shared our reading with each other, and some of us had written papers on Black feminism for group discussion a few months before this decision was made. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. We had a retreat in the late spring which provided a time for both political discussion and working out interpersonal issues. Currently we are planning to gather together a collection of Black feminist writing. We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics to other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work. The fact that individual Black feminists are living in isolation all over the country, that our own numbers are small, and that we have some skills in writing, printing, and publishing makes us want to carry out these kinds of projects as a means of organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups.

Black Feminist Issues and Projects

During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. We might, for example, become involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs Third World women or picket a hospital that is cutting back on already inadequate health care to a Third World community, or set up a rape crisis center in a Black neighborhood. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression.

Issues and projects that collective members have actually worked on are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape and health care. We have also done many workshops and educationals on black feminism on college campuses, at women’s conferences, and more recently for high school women.

One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue.

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes:

I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested- interest-power.

As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.

Republished with permission of Monthly Review Press, from “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” appeared originally in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, 1977.

NOTES

1 This statement is dated April 1977.

2 Michele Wallace. “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” The Village Voice, July 28, 1975, pp. 6–7.

3 Mumininas of Committee for Unified Newark, Mwanamke Mwananchi (The Nationalist Woman), Newark, NJ © 1971, pp. 4–5.

* The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist group in Boston whose name came from the guerilla action conceptualized and led by Harriet Tubman on June 2, 1863, in the Port Royal region of South Carolina. This action freed more than 750 slaves and is the only military campaign in American history planned and led by a woman.

With the context of the pathologization of homosexuality by the psychological establishment in the early 20th century in mind, we examine in this chapter the rise of queer liberation movements. We end with the rise of gay liberation movements in the 1970s.